Exactly one week after the deadly mass shooting in the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) in Charleston, a fire erupted at a black church 200 miles north. NBC News reported last week:

A predominately black church in North Carolina was intentionally set ablaze, authorities said.

Charlotte fire officials are looking into whether Wednesday morning's arson at Briar Creek Baptist Church was a hate crime, NBC station WCNC reported. Although there were no initial indications that the crime was motivated by hate, officials haven't ruled it out, fire investigator David Williams told the station.

Fortunately, no one was killed, though the blaze reportedly caused about $250,000 in damage.

The same night, God's Power Church of Christ in Macon, Georgia, was set ablaze. Around the same time, the Glover Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Warrenville, South Carolina caught fire. Last week, College Hill Seventh Day Adventist burned in Knoxville, Tennessee.

A report in The Atlantic pointed to some other fires at churches over the last two weeks, though in those cases, the circumstances appear to be less suspicious, and in one instance, the church does not have a predominantly black congregation.

Nevertheless, given the number of incidents, and the possibility of arson in some of the cases, federal investigators are taking an interest. BuzzFeed reported yesterday:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's (R) grasp of constitutional law has long been a little fuzzy. In January, the Republican presidential candidate said Supreme Court rulings don't set the law of the land because decisions need to be enshrined by lawmakers through "enabling legislation."

Huckabee's argument was presented in anticipation of a Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, which arrived on Friday. Right on cue, the former governor made a similar argument to ABC's George Stephanopoulos yesterday.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So are you calling for civil disobedience?

HUCKABEE: I don't think a lot of pastors and Christian schools are going to have a choice. They either are going to follow God, their conscience and what they truly believe is what the scripture teaches them, or they will follow civil law. They will go the path of Dr. Martin Luther King, who in his brilliant essay the letters from a Birmingham jail reminded us, based on what St. Augustine said, that an unjust law is no law at all. And I do think that we're going to see a lot of pastors who will have to make this tough decision.

He added moments later, "I'm not sure that every governor and every attorney general should just say, well, 'It's the law of the land,' because there's no enabling legislation." When Stephanopoulos asked if he would enforce federal law if elected president, Huckabee said it would depend on Congress passing "enabling legislation."

Just as a basic matter of how the American government works, what the GOP candidate is saying simply doesn't make any sense.

At an event over the weekend, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) was asked about last week's Supreme Court rulings on the Affordable Care Act and marriage equality. The right-wing Iowan, not surprisingly, wasn't pleased, calling the court decisions "the heaviest one-two punch delivered against the Constitution and the American people that we've ever seen in the history of this country."

Of course, Steve King is expected to say things like this. When presidential candidates go over the top in the same way, it's a little more alarming. MSNBC's Benjy Sarlin reported:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) went so far as to call for a constitutional convention to overturn the court's decision while campaigning in Iowa, according to CNN. In an interview with Sean Hannity he called the back-to-back rulings on health care and gay marriage "some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation's history."

For what it's worth, it's not hard to think of some genuinely tragic 24-hour periods in American history. The Lincoln assassination comes to mind. So does the time British troops burned the White House. There were days during the Civil War in which tens of thousands of Americans died on the battlefield. Just in the last century, we witnessed the JFK assassination, Pearl Harbor, and a corrupt president resign in disgrace.

For the Republican presidential hopeful, learning that Americans will have health benefits and loving couples will get married belongs on the same list.

To be sure, while much of the country will probably find that odd, it's equally important to appreciate what Cruz intends to do with his outrage.

This Tuesday, you will get a little extra time added to your day. NASA is adding a leap second on June 30th to account for changes in the Earth's rotation that are causing it to slow down.

The length of a day is 86,400 seconds in theory, but in practice day's last slightly longer, averaging 86,400.002 seconds instead. In fact, over the past several hundred years, the length of a day has been increasing between 1.4-1.7 milliseconds per century. While that might not seem like a lot, when you add up all the additionally milliseconds over a year or more, they start to matter - especially in the era of atomic clocks.

First up from the God Machine this week is a closer look at the religious right movement's reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on marriage equality -- which can roughly be described as this generation of the movement's worst nightmare.

To put it mildly, the religious right isn't altogether pleased. Right Wing Watch pulled together a collection of reactions yesterday from some of the movement's more notable groups and leaders, all of whom are apoplectic. But only one religious right figure compared the ruling to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor -- and then kept going.

Following the Supreme Court ruling striking down state bans on gay marriage this morning, American Family Radio's Bryan Fischer had a bit of a meltdown on Twitter, which he subsequently cobbled together into a column that he then read on his radio program this afternoon.

In the span of two minutes, he managed to compare the ruling to 9/11, slavery, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Sodom and Gomorrah.

"From a moral standpoint, 6/26 is the new 9/11," Fischer declared, "because it was on this day that five justices of the United States Supreme Court became moral jihadists. They became rainbow jihadists and they blasted the twin pillars of truth and righteousness into rubble. And they did this by imposing sodomy-based marriage on the United States through an act of judicial tyranny."

Fischer quite literally referred to June 26, 2015 as "a date which will live in infamy. On this day, the United States became Sodom and Gomorrah."

Mary Bonauto, the attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the same-sex marriage case that made history today, talks with Rachel Maddow about what it was like to hear the final ruling that has established marriage equality as the law of the land. watch

Rachel Maddow reviews the profound and historic news events of the past week, leading up to the Supreme Court's ruling on marriage equality and the subsequent bureaucratic announcements and celebrations across the United States. watch

* New York: "Richard Matt, one of the two killers who escaped an upstate New York prison three weeks ago, was shot and killed Friday, two senior New York state officials told NBC News. The whereabouts of the second escapee, David Sweat, were also not immediately known."

* Tunisia: "At least 37 people were killed and dozens wounded when gunmen opened fire on a beach popular with tourists in Tunisia on Friday, officials said."

* Not just Tunisia: "Terrorists launched horrific attacks across three continents Friday, killing dozens of people just days after ISIS urged supporters to unleash "a month of disaster" during the Muslim holy period of Ramadan. A man was decapitated in an apparent Islamist attack on a U.S.-owned gas factory in southeastern France, while 25 worshipers were killed and 200 wounded during Friday prayers at a Shi'ite mosque in Kuwait."

* A story to keep an eye on: "Some couples who wished to get married immediately after the Supreme Court lifted the bans on same-sex marriage in the 14 states that prohibited it Friday were met with roadblocks."

* The other big ruling today: "In the case Johnson v. United States, the Supreme Court just struck down a provision of the Armed Career Criminal Act that says that someone's past crimes count as "violent" if they involve a risk of serious injury to another person -- even if the crime didn't actually involve violence."

* Congress: "Two measures were discussed in the House chamber Thursday: one pertaining to Confederate Battle Flag imagery in the U.S. Capitol, and another banning the iconography from the South Carolina Capitol and any government property."

When Barack Obama's presidency is over, I have a strong hunch people will still be talking about the eulogy he delivered in South Carolina today for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.

Because the president's remarks today were about Pinckney and other victims of last week's mass murder in Charleston, but it was also about much, much more.

It was about the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina capitol.

"The flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now.

"Removing the flag from this state's capital would not be an act of political correctness. It would not an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be acknowledgement that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong. The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong.

"It would be one step in an honest accounting of America's history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds. It would be an expression of the amazing changes that have transformed this state and this country for the better because of the work of so many people of goodwill, people of all races, striving to form a more perfect union.

"By taking down that flag, we express God's grace."

It was about the criminal justice system.

"Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal-justice system and lead us to make sure that that system's not infected with bias -- that we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure."

President Obama's full eulogy

For Democratic presidential candidates, today's Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality is unqualified great news -- Hillary Clinton and her rivals can celebrate without reservation, knowing that their party's base sees today as a breakthrough for American civil rights.

For Republicans, it's just a little more complicated. MSNBC's Benjy Sarlin had a good piece on this today.

Republican presidential hopefuls responded to the Supreme Court's historic same-sex marriage decision Friday with a mix of tepid disapproval and fiery condemnation, reflecting the party's deep unease with an issue where public opinion tilted decisively toward equality well before the law had caught up.

Consider Jeb Bush's measure tone, for example. "I believe the Supreme Court should have allowed the states to make this decision," the Florida Republican said in a statement. "I also believe that we should love our neighbor and respect others, including those making lifetime commitments."

It's not exactly Scalia-esque.

And it's easy to understand why. On the one hand, GOP presidential candidates realize that much of their party's right-wing base -- including the religious right movement, which is powerful in early nominating states like Iowa -- sees today's decision as a genuine travesty. On the other hand, the American mainstream has already embraced marriage equality, and Republicans who plan to compete nationally have to be careful about alienating a general-election audience.

It's a dynamic that leads to some caution. Literally every GOP candidate criticized the high court's decision, and nearly everyone in the field stressed "religious" liberty, which must have done well in focus groups.

But from there, two camps emerged, divided by strategies over what happens next.

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Launched in 2008, “The Rachel Maddow Show” follows the machinations of policy making in America, from local political activism to international diplomacy. Rachel Maddow looks past the distractions of political theater and stunts and focuses on the legislative proposals and policies that shape American life - as well as the people making and influencing those policies and their ultimate outcome, intended or otherwise.